Americans can relax now that they no longer need refer to their Bibles in order to discover the Lord's will - The Wall Street Journal is now explaining moral issues with such clarity and conviction that surely this corporate-loyal oracle will supplant the archaic texts of the Bible. After all, in modern America, who needs the word of God when our country's moral course is in fact already determined by our great God mammon, who teaches us that wealth and comfort are all that matter, and that "He who dies with the most toys wins!" ?

In its October 19 edition. The Wall Street Journal editorial page (A18) attacks a recent British study which estimated that 655,000 Iraqis have been killed in the current Iraq War. In "The 655,000 Fraud," the Journal editorial questions the motives of those who "trumpet" the study's findings, concluding that "[t]heir goal isn't merely to nail the Bush Administration for incompetence in failing to achieve a sustainable victory in Iraq. They also, and perversely, want to discredit the war as a moral enterprise by suggesting there's no difference between Saddam Hussein's now well documented mass murders and the violence taking place today." The Journal then quotes an Iraqi journalist who calls the figures an exaggeration: "All they want is to prove that our struggle for freedom was the wrong thing to do"¦.This fake research is an insult to every man, woman and child who lost their lives." The Wall Street Journal is engaging here in moralizing: with such a tremendous readership and influence, and with the stakes as high as they are for the American people and the world, the Journal's logic invites analysis.

It is dubious to claim that exaggerated casualty numbers "insult" the victims of war, or to claim that those who attempted to measure civilian deaths only seek to prove that the "struggle for freedom" in Iraq was wrong. Many people of the world feel profound sorrow for the loss of civilian life in Iraq, and The Wall Street Journal would dismiss their compassion as politically motivated, an insult to those for whom they have compassion, and a denigration of the Iraqi people's "struggle for freedom." Assuming the 655,000 figure to be unreliable, it hardly follows that there is more comfort in a figure of, say, 250,000. The Journal seeks to expand a debate about numbers into a dispute over the morality of the war, thereby obfuscating the true moral issues. The editorial goes so far as to compare this number with "the number of Germans killed by allied bombing during all of World War II and larger than the number of Americans who died during our own Civil War," as if it is unfathomable to perceive that modern American armaments could not rival such murderous accomplishments allowed more than three years in Iraq since March 2003. Did the Wall Street's editorial staff forget Nagasaki? What would carpet bombs and laser-guided missiles have done to German or American civilian populations? What does the number of killed in World War II have to do with the accuracy of reports of Iraq dead? According to this editorial, the connection is one of faith: ""¦we find it hard to believe killing on the scale of Antietam or Gettysburg has been going on without anybody having noticed"¦." (Of course, it would be impossible for anyone to notice when the American press was "embedded" away from almost all civilian casualty areas, and when we have media outlets like the Wall Street spouting illogic like this. Foreign media have filmed the unceasing violence which has gripped Iraq since the beginning of what the Journal calls its "struggle for freedom," but the American media blackout has ensured such coverage is not seen at home, and The Wall Street is apparently ever-ready to dismiss Iraqi children's deaths as insignificant, or justified"¦for their liberation.)

But this editorial goes even further, suggesting that those who "want to discredit the war as a moral enterprise" are "perverse" because they "suggest"¦ there's no difference between Saddam Hussein's now well-documented mass murders and the violence taking place today." This mischaracterizes the debate in a deliberate effort to shift attention away from the true moral issues:

1) The world will not forget that America armed Saddam Hussein, enabling him to commit those murders we now say we're avenging on behalf of the Iraqis. It is The Wall Street Journal that is seeking to make the comparison between deaths under Saddam and the current war, and it was the Bush administration which hypocritically used those deaths as a (last-ditch) justification for the invasion. Now that it appears that civilian deaths in Iraq occasioned by the American aggression are indeed approaching the numbers of those killed by Saddam, the Wall Street (and Bush) bristle at comparisons"¦

2) Most Americans would not contend that "there's no difference between Saddam Hussein's now well-documented mass murders and the violence taking place today." Most Americans would contend that there is a very big difference indeed, for one expects a tyrant to slaughter, but Americans would perceive that if their country had made (or been led into) an error which caused even a few civilian deaths, this would be a worse evil than Saddam's, for we call ourselves champions of good. The violence taking place in Iraq today is worse than that caused by Saddam, because it has been caused by America. This is a qualitative difference, not the quantitative one that The Wall Street Journal seeks to emphasize. The Journal would have its readers weigh morality on the scales of the numbers killed, rather than from the motives of the actors: this is moral relativism of the worst kind. Soon, The Wall Street will be compelled by its own logic to argue that civilian deaths in Iraq are nothing compared to Hitler's genocidal actions"¦.

3) The numbers of those killed are not relevant: this war was patently illegal, based on willfully manufactured falsehood, and violates the Christian doctrine which both America and George W. Bush say they hold dear. The Iraq War was not necessary to defend the United States, and our false intelligence information is not an excuse. The Christian doctrine of just war, itself a minority view in Christianity, is the only Christian concept which could be employed to justify such a war on Christian grounds, but it was ignored by Bush and by most of America's Christian leaders. Because the war cannot be defended in Christian ethics, it is defended instead by corporate America and The Wall Street Journal, whose "ends justify the means" logic is a palliative to a comfortable, ignorant and fearful America.

If the war in Iraq was based on false evidence used to dupe the American people and the Religious Right; if 9/11 was used to justify an invasion into Iraq which Bush had been seeking since before he took office; if the American government deliberately invaded a defenseless people after decades of ignoring (and worsening) their plight, and now seeks to say that they "did it for them": if these things are true, which they irrefutably are, then the debate is not, and should not be permitted to be, about how many dead there are - all of their corpses are on the heads not only of America's leaders, but on those who have supported this war.

Yet these numbers are still relevant. For what becomes clear with the passage of time is that even if one accepts the argument that force was justified to remove a murderous Saddam, at what point does the cure become worse than the affliction? If 5,000,000 Iraqis end up dead in a Civil War caused by the current instability, it then becomes evident that the United States failed to "liberate" the people. (Of course, almost every Middle East academic in the world agreed pre-invasion that Saddam was a lesser evil than the instability which would doubtless replace him.) At this juncture, the Bush administration would have absolutely no remaining "justification" for its war effort, and the ugly truth would be apparent. Of course, this outcome and eventual accounting is inevitable, not just for Bush but for the whole American nation.

The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics (at p. 512, 1986 edition) discusses two senses of the principle of "proportionality":

One is the proportion (fittingness, appropriateness) of specific means in relation to specific ends of action"¦. In a discussion of killing in self-defense Thomas Aquinas argues that "though proceeding form a good intention, an act may be rendered unlawful, if it be out of proportion to the end" and that "if a man, in self-defense, uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful." The second sense is broader - the proportion or balance among the various immediate and long-term consequences of actions"¦.There is little dispute about the moral relevance of judgments of proportionality; the dispute concerns their limits.

Again, the war in Iraq violates Christian ethics on its face because preemption is patently toxic to the just war doctrine. But even those who refuse to address this cannot avoid the issue of proportionality. Using the discussion of proportionality employed by The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, two logical questions arise from applying this measure to America's foray into Iraq:

1) Were the means employed by the United States "fitting" and "appropriate" to the stated end of ousting Saddam? The more Iraqis die, the more obvious it is that the means have eclipsed that end: that the U.S. "liberation" of Iraq is worse for the Iraqi people than life under Saddam.

2) Was the American invasion of Iraq "proportionate and balanced among the various immediate and long-term consequences of actions"? Despite official (and media) efforts at denial, it is clear that the venture in Iraq, far from being a war on terror, is more like a war to incite terror. The ranks of al Qaeda swell daily, even as this administration proclaims how successful it's been. The long-term effect of this war has been to increase anti-American sentiment and consequently the ranks of extremists. Contrary to persistent administration efforts to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, Iraq had no such connection whatsoever, and so an attack against Iraq cannot in logic be justified as a "balanced" response to the 9/11 attacks.

By all Christian moral standards, and on all counts, the war in Iraq is immoral and unlawful. Yet The Wall Street Journal attacks those who seek to "discredit the war as a moral enterprise." Perhaps The Wall Street Journal would kindly establish what about this war can be credited morally. "The war as a moral enterprise" is a miserably failed enterprise indeed. The War in Iraq has absolutely no moral credibility remaining in the world, regardless of how many civilians have been murdered as a direct consequence of U.S. policy. And one of America's leading (to its embarrassment) newspapers is debating the numbers"¦. No wonder this administration makes no effort to calculate the numbers of civilian deaths from U.S. operations in Iraq - all such numbers undermine the claimed legitimacy of its cause.

Perhaps more Americans will begin to reflect on the morality of their Bibles, and of their hearts. Because if there is one thing which is extremely clear, it is that the morality of Wall Street and of the United States government is leading America into irreversible darkness"¦.regardless of how many Iraqi children we have killed. May God bless America!

John Stoddard Klar,

www.christianwords.us